Disk imaging to NAS

Looking to get a nas and have it create a disk image of my laptop's raid 0 setup, what is the best nas and software to use with the nas. Ideally, I want to have to raid 1 drives one for my Brother and one for myself. I know this would require 4 Drives connected to the nas. What are my best options and software choices?

 

I don't think you specifically need a four bay NAS for this. RAID 0 will end up being one disk image. You could probably store both your and your brother's image on a single drive and RAID 1 this drive - so two bay NAS would be fine.

As for imaging software - I use Acronis and I'm reasonably happy with it (although when a backup fails for some reason Acronis gets stuck using one CPU core at 100% for whatever reason - unless you kill it manually it's going to stay like that until next reboot).

Not every imaging software supports creating images over networks and if they do it often requires more expensive version (some equivalent of Pro version rather than Personal one).

I can't really say how this works because my setup is different - first of all my NASes have TrueCrypt containers on them. I backup to within those containers. Since NASes are mapped as network drives, TrueCrypt sees those containers on them and mounts them as local drives in Windows. That's why I can use any backup software not just ones that support backups over network. Secondly my backups are stored encrypted so if a NAS gets stolen, so be it - no one is going to access that data.

Third and final difference - I don't create disk images. Instead I have backups of predetermined folders being made every day- documents, photos, mail, desktop etc. You might want to have a backup of system partition as well and that's why you want a drive image - I understand the benefit of it - but keep in mind that tis means a lot of data to back up. That will take a lot of time and you will probably shy away from doing it daily - which kind of defeats the purpose.

As for the choice of NAS - Synology and QNAP are considered the best. Asustor is catching up. I don't like the price-tags on those devices though. My current favorite for a 4 bay NAS with a reasonable price is a ZyXEL NAS 540.

If you insist on backing up whole drives and possibly daily you have to go for the fastest NAS you can buy though - your absolute best scenario is a speed of about 110MB/s but that is a bit unrealistic to expect it to be maintained through the whole process.

 

Could you explain more of how I would wire my set up using Acronis ? What is the ideal solution?

 

There is no ideal solution as such - it depends on what exactly do you want to achieve. Is your primary objective a backup of data or an image of the whole OS? Do you plan on doing those backups daily or weekly?

As for if Acronis TrueImage can backup to NAS or a server in general in normal consumer version, I'll have to check it when I'm back home - I'm away right now and don't have access to that laptop.

 

yes i plan on backing up nightly

 

Whole system image or just data?

 

I've played a lot with full daily backing up to NAS. Even a Gigabit LAN still too slow for that purpose. Finally, I end up with daily backup of highly sensitive data to NAS (~350Mb) and full backup (~150Gb) to external USB3.0 HDD weekly, because making full backup daily takes a lot of time.

Everything done with Acronis True Image. It have an ability to create an incremental backup but I've had bad experience with it when one of the files in a backup chain got broken, so I decided not to use this mode.

 

You might want to try differential backup. Unlike incremental it requires only the last full backup and a current one, not the whole chain up to the current one. I don't use differential for the same reason as you.

 

What software should I use?

 

Actonic TrueImage would be my recommendation. I'm happy with it. It can backup to any NAS if you create a local share on the computer (basically map a NAS as a drive) and then configure Acronis to use this space.

 

I say daily backup, but i'd be happy with a weekly disk image and nightly backup of much needed information. . just in case my raid 0 fails to boot I can boot from nas and start rebuilding my raid 0.

 

You could give Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE a try. It's a very powerful backup tool, originating from the enterprise market.

 

I'd also look at Paragon Hard Disk Manager. With Acronis I had bad experience a few years back and switched to Paragon, never looked back after.

Excellent rescue media (both Windows and Linux based ones), incremental backups work without a hitch - and I've used this extensively. After trying Win10, I fled back to Win 8.1, and my Win8.1 backup was spread across 6 incremental images.

 

ok if i want to drop in new hard drives, what is the best software to transfer all the data and clone the current drives? Raid 0 currently set up and looking to get two faster and bigger capacity drives to drop in.